The Icing Princess

As her steady, skilled hands squeeze and release swirls of pink icing from piping bags to make the most perfect little rosettes atop multi-tiered cakes, Elayna Berean has sliced and diced the title of mere pastry chef, to emerge as the princess of pastry. P.Ramakrishnan takes a bite out of the purveyor of culinary delights, whose confections are the sugar-filled talk of the town and her creations are - without exaggeratedly - unequivocally art.

It's a miracle that she doesn't weigh 300 pounds and is on a "before" shot on posters you see in MTR stations, heralding the benefits of diet pills, Elayna Berean, 32, makes cakes. Big, beautiful cakes. Cakes so exquisite that it breaks your heart to slice into them and destroy all evidence of their near-mythic splendour.

The opening of a high-end boutique at The Landmark was when the creme-de-la-creme of Hong Kong saw and tasted a sample of Berean's exquisite work, An intricate construct, the five-tiered little giant was garnished with what looked like a bouquet of fresh flowers (each flower made of sugar in fact). There were laminate, golden cherubs and swans circumnavigating the entire confection, and verdant vines (also made of green icing) draped across it. As they say, it was love at first bite. Not only were the delicate little angels picture perfect, they tasted like heaven too.

"The best part is coming up with the concept and designing, sometimes looking through fabulous design books, surfing the net, and making collage cutouts that I collect for inspiration," she says as we go over a carefully constructed booklet of her past creations, photographed and catalogued over the last few years, "And also, the end of it all, seeing the final product is wonderful. The process is great too, but sometimes in the beginning, when you start with your blank canvas, or when you're in the middle of it all - you think to yourself, my god how heinous will this be?! I'm glad it always works out!"

Berean, with the elfin joie de vivre of a college sophomore, has maintained an exuberant enthusiasm in what she does, despite spending long, lonesome hours, painting with edible colours, and sculpting with powdered dough. A one-woman enterprise, she creates, bakes and makes everything from start to finish all by herself.

"What most people are not aware of is the thought process that goes into designing custom cakes - the research, the collages - like an interior design board - how finely thought out the flavours are, how the preserves used are often hand made. The time that goes into making a perfect sugar flower, every single little thing that you see, I've had to make," she says. "Oh, and those who just look at them and don't taste them don't realise how delicious the cakes are either!"

An incredibly valid point - for all their good looks and photogenic appeal, at the end of the day, if the cakes tasted like Styrofoam, Berean would be out of business.

"Flavour is so important," says Berean and lists her inspirations. "I get inspired by fashion, magazines, design (interior, even industrial designers), flowers, colours, art, a certain herb or even a spice, I look at the outside decorative inspiration as much as the internal flavour. I must taste something infused with some strange flavour and immediately my thoughts go to 'Oh that would be great as a cake!'. Then, I might end up doing something like a Middle Eastern or a Persian cake, and use orange or cardamon and try a hybrid mixture of flavours to quite literally, spice up my creation."

Born in Taipei and raised in Hawaii, with her high school years in London and on the East Coast of the US, this half-Greek, half-Chinese confectioner's worldly travels and residence are as multi-flavoured as her ingenious mixes of dough and butter. Do note that her current profession is not the culmination of a life-long dream brought on by Barbie's kitchen accessories. Berean is an MBA graduate from Wharton and worked in New York for years before moving to San Francisco with her husband. She finally got a chance to take a break and put her erstwhile career on hold.

"I got the opportunity to pursue one of my dreams , to go to culinary school," she says describing her welcome pause from business. "I enrolled in a part-time pastry programme, which was more geared towards older students looking for another career, versus those who were looking to attend culinary school instead of college. I worked at Aqua (San Francisco), in the pastry kitchen as well as at the Ritz Carlton - just to see what working in a professional kitchen was like. Needless to say, I didn't really like it."

Unlike her creations, Berean says she was bitter about the whole experience. "Well of course I was bitter, because I don't smoke and my colleagues were out puffing away on breaks that I wasn't taking, and it just wasn't the environment I wanted to be in."

Instead of caving in to the demands of the restaurant and hotel business, Berean went in for sweet surrender. "I started practicing and teaching myself about the various aspects of decorating a cake - making sugar flowers, piping designs with a piping bag, frosting a cake, using fondant - and I thought to myself that ultimately I wanted to move, live and work in Asia, either in China or Hong Kong. It's very similar to New York in terms of the way people celebrate - the opulence, the possible size of wedding parties and other big celebrations - and I thought 'Why not create custom cakes?' It is something I love, and something where there is a under served niche. When we, my husband and I, had the opportunity to move to Hong Kong, I couldn't have been happier."

From her lips to fate's ear the right mix of ingredients has brought Berean to our shores. She moved to Hong Kong just a few months ago and by simple word-of-mouth promotion and media interest, slices of her cakes have carved their way into some high-end table settings.

In her culinary journey across the region, she says she has found inspiration in local restaurants too, "It's very dependent on the calibre of restaurant we are talking about and I haven't really been inspired by the presentation of food, but I have been by the tastes. Suppose I've just tasted a well-composed dessert, my mind starts racing with ideas. I don't always get inspired by just cakes, it might be a tart, a certain combination of flavours, or even a mixture of seasoning."

Berean confesses that in her hunt for the perfect combination of texture and mouth-watering sensory stimuli, she's seen through some self-proclaimed bizarre-ness. "I have strange food phases - it's best to call them that. There was the one year when all I really wanted to eat were raspberry fig newtons, Diet Coke (in a paper cup, no glasses), red vines (those disgusting pseudo licorices) and cheddar cheese! Oh, and fat-free pretzels! Then there was the phase where I loved mini Swedish fish. Then gummies that I could scoop out from various bins and were sold by weight! Recently, it has been fruit and nut and vanilla coffee powder from coffee beans."

Fortunately for those who've ordered the unique cake, the final creation is perfected in flavour and look - and the food phases are relegated to her personal file, not her professional.

"The right combination is important as well as the aesthetic. For example, with Tiffany and Co, I had to interpret a China pattern for a blue and white cake. I noticed that every plate was different and had some kind of fruit or vegetable on it. I remember thinking , 'God, I can't have blue tomatoes on a wedding cake!' that would be so unappetising! So I stuck to strawberries, oranges and other fruits."

In full disclosure, it needs to be said that in the role of investigator/reporter, I've had the utter joy to sample Berean's cakes and am a willing, obliging and grateful taster.

"You're very sweet," she says with a laugh. "I do taste what I make and until I'm satisfied, I do not deliver. If I'm not happy with what I make, why would anyone else be?"


For further inquiries, log on to www.elaynamariecakes.com

UPDATE: Sadly, Elayna left Hong Kong a while ago and think she put her cakes on hold for family. Still the best pastry chef I've ever met in my life.

Sept 2019